Musings of a Software Development Manager

I was working with some clients recently when one of them leaned back in his chair and announced: “Well Paul’s leaving. I guess he finally got fed up.” The group of developers and sysadmins were disappointed at the news. They wondered why he decided to leave as it turned out he was a key champion [...]

After an incredible hype cycle back in 2005 many organizations took the plunge. We were going to ride SOA into a new highly productive development environment. The idea was we’d build business services and then start composing applications on the fly based on these service components. The reasons for diving headfirst into SOA included: Gartner [...]

I’ve been meaning to put together an example of all the Hamcrest assertions that have been added to JUnit 4 way back in 2007 now. My assumption based on a number of recent client engagements is that if unit testing is being done with JUnit the default is still to rely on assertEquals() as the [...]

Everyone has that trunk of old junk tucked away in the attic. It’s almost spring and time to think about getting organized, tossing out old junk, and having a garage sale. Apache has managed to create an online concept of a software attic. Old open source projects that have outlived there useful lives can be [...]

The image above probably needs a bit of explanation. After having a lingering todo I finally made a donation and requested a Green Clean Code band from Uncle Bob Martin. I was at a talk of his at SD West 2005. At that point he pointed out a rubber band he was wearing that he [...]

Michael Feathers wrote a tough post recently on UI testing tools. The fact of the matter is that UI based testing should be used for UIs: that’s it. You should not be testing your full application end-to-end through a UI Testing tool. First of all, that sort of testing couples some of the most important [...]

I came across a note of mine from last year on my baseline expectations for developers: All code is checked into source control on an hourly basis or at most daily. Every project has an automated build. (Maven, Ant) All projects are setup in continuous integration (Hudson) All code follows the current Java/Groovy coding standards. [...]

According to a Forester report the multiple IDEs for Java developers is standard practice: While Eclipse is common, it won’t become the only Java IDE in enterprise IT shops any time soon. Less than one out of five Java developers have a single primary Java IDE and no other. – Jeffery S. Hammond (Forrester Research) [...]

Not too long ago a local recruiter noted at a JUG meeting: “I don’t care what else you have on your resume, but you have to have Spring and Hibernate. I know it was all EJB and SOA just a few years ago, but now if you don’t have Spring/Hibernate you’re not getting past the [...]

I know you wonder why developers come charging into the help desk right after you’ve delivered the sparkling new machine with 8GB of RAM, dual monitors and a quad core processor. They start babbling about how they need admin access or you might as well give them there old Pentium 4 box so they can [...]